The current situation with garages

[College Sweetheart]

i think a system wherein a player has to purchase the appropriate materials and tools to work on a car themselves (select modifications you could do at home like detailing, etcetera) would be pretty fucking rad and encourage a lot of roleplay

 

 

just so i don't double-post either, i've had plenty of decent interactions/built relationships just from carefully roleplaying car modifications while actively chatting up the owner who i specifically tell to come and watch, just starting up conversations so and so so they're not just bombarded with my 255 character emotes. not sure if others try to do this anymore though considering garages are becoming thin and few and now any single one that opens gets packed instantly in 10 seconds with 30 cars lined up compared to 6 months ago when there was active competition

Edited July 24, 2021 by College Sweetheart

[shaobadman]

34 minutes ago, Aquila said:

Exactly. I won't fault anyone for wanting to RP a mechanic, but some things that are fun in real life, are not always fun in-game.

 

I have similar thoughts on this, Topinambour said it best when this discussion came up in 2019.

 

 

Nothing wrong with it between parties who actually enjoy the experience but it's just a barrier for many players.

[Uthenera]

Tldr, screw over a portion of players the enjoy the roleplay that they do as a mechanic and have to deal with players constantly telling them to hurry so the masses can go brrr and continue the roleplay they enjoy to do? Either way one party is getting effected massively by any of the solutions that are being offered. This supposed to be a heavy roleplay server, with high expectations set on the roleplay involved. I fail to see why having to have your car worked on through roleplay is a bad thing? It's what you signed up for when applying to a server like this. I am pretty sure the old system was changed cause it was being abused with people upgrading their car with no roleplay what so ever. Either way no need to further waste my time trying to argue over where or not someone just be able to go beep boop and have a turbo'd car in an instant just because you don't care for the roleplay other people are doing. 

[Yerrr]

1 hour ago, Vassilios said:

Some garages do open only for friends. I did that too sometimes. There's nothing wrong with that if roleplay is being done.

 

Sometimes you don't have time or want to roleplay twenty vehicles that'll come.

your telling me in 10 minutes of uptime (since the new cars dropped) these 'mechanics' had time to fully deck out at least 10 cars? please lol

[Uthenera]

Just now, Yerrr said:

your telling me in 10 minutes of uptime (since the new cars dropped) these 'mechanics' had time to fully deck out at least 10 cars? please lol

With people yelling that they want their stuff done it wouldn't surprise me, not to mention when you have a four to five mechanics working and the current expectation is ten to twenty minutes per car and that's because of people wanting it done fast not the people don't want to roleplay it. That's four or five cars every ten minutes or ten every twenty.

[Yerrr]

41 minutes ago, College Sweetheart said:

funny you should say that because we immediately went to battle stations when people pulled up without even an /ad to work on people's cars when they started pulling up, 80% of them not even being anyone we know while only a small portion were our friends that rolled in and only hung out at the parking lot spaces without any work done on their car because we specifically told them no

 

get the full story before assuming and then calling people out about it on a thread so you don't look stupid when you get corrected by the people from that garage. i'm sorry if this is toxic but i couldn't help but defend that situation specifically because we're one of the few garages that try to keep a high standard in terms of roleplay despite a good portion of us being burned out which can definitely result in us turning people away frequently when not opened, but in that situation we stood 10 toes and worked on cars instead of shooing people off

 

OT: there's definitely a lot of flaws to the garage system, and this is coming from someone who's worked 4 months straight in one solo as the sole active mechanic, but at the same time considering how much roleplay is done behind vehicular work compared to other jobs there should be efficiently balanced compensation to motivate people because at the end of the day, it feels shitty when you run through 30 emotes for 30 minutes only to be paid $1,000

The fact that you got defensive speaks volume, I'm not out to get anyone it's just from what I (and a lot of others it seems) see. One of few garages that keep a high standard.............................................................................................. I'm not gonna bash anybody. Again, admins should look into who owns what garage and how their QUALITY is.

A good garage for example?

Glass Heroes. The quality roleplay is unmatched.

[Yerrr]

1 minute ago, Bridget Schmidt said:

With people yelling that they want their stuff done it wouldn't surprise me, not to mention when you have a four to five mechanics working and the current expectation is ten to twenty minutes per car and that's because of people wanting it done fast not the people don't want to roleplay it. That's four or five cars every ten minutes or ten every twenty.

They should be working in a pit-stop for NASCAR rather than a garage 🤣😂

[Uthenera]

Just now, Yerrr said:

They should be working in a pit-stop for NASCAR rather than a garage 🤣😂

Or people should lower their expectation and impatience on how long it should take to do? This can go back and forth all day long but at the end of the day it's the customers yelling about their stuff taking forever that cause it to go fast, not the other way around. I can spend hours roleplaying an engine swap if I wanted to and have the time for it. Hell I have on my car when I have nothing else to do because I enjoy the roleplay of doing. This kind of argument is what confuses me on this post, you want more realistic roleplay with garages fine? Oh wait you want less time being needed to be spend or just to do it yourself with a script and no roleplay? Those two arguments are contradictory to themselves and offer no valid solutions.  

[College Sweetheart]

6 minutes ago, Yerrr said:

The fact that you got defensive speaks volume, I'm not out to get anyone it's just from what I (and a lot of others it seems) see. One of few garages that keep a high standard.............................................................................................. I'm not gonna bash anybody. Again, admins should look into who owns what garage and how their QUALITY is.

as far as i'm concerned administration already actively looks into garages and who owns them which is why a lot of them end up getting closed down because they're being taken from people for subpar roleplay, i personally visit other garages from time to time just as a means to observe roleplay or wait and see if they'll run the car to me in 2 minutes when i asked for an extensive list of modifications compared to the 15-30 we take

 

funny you quote me with the first sentence clarifying that though when clearly you weren't so passive talking about the garage itself until someone stepped up to correct you. the insinuating "..." doesn't help the energy you carried into this thread dude, just stop it and say what you want to say, it's a general discussion and i'd be happy to have a civil conversation with you

 

14 minutes ago, Yerrr said:

your telling me in 10 minutes of uptime (since the new cars dropped) these 'mechanics' had time to fully deck out at least 10 cars? please lol

hard to keep track of people when they start getting in their cars and leaving. no admin at the time neither so my /reports were unheard but try again, we can't pull guns and start shooting people who are too impatient to wait when they literally ask to fully deck out their cars so we're forced to sit there like bitches

 

anti-derail moment past here

 

4 hours ago, liq said:

I've successfully held together a good auto shop for about a year. There's quite a few strains on the system as a whole:

• There's little incentive for role-play around cars; it's instead incentivized by $. $ in game has devalued in the last year and a half or so. It's not interesting to grind.
• There's little quality control from either Property Management or the administration in general when it comes to role-playing auto shops/automotive stuff in general. Thirteen used to be the best at this because he's got first hand knowledge and during his era as HoP/HoL, no unfit garage owner was left to exist on the server. The standard has dropped simply because people are competent to write an application but do none of the things they set out to do, and PM is incredibly strained to be able to look into the quality aspect of something. The only time the server's administration has verifiably stepped in (Glass Heroes, Kazanov, etc.) is when the situation was tenfold worse or there were obvious wrongdoings (i.e. Glass Heroes raking in $1.2M cash a every 2 days and giving people /me's to copy paste off their Discord).
• There's little incentive for someone who knows and/or enjoys car role-play to do the actual role-play. /bad costs the price of Gold Donator to be able to open the business, whereas the community as a whole doesn't want to bother having to wait for car modifications to happen.

The best solution is to make a system that allows a player to modify menial things on their car by themselves at the cost of in game $ and role-play. Menial things range from wheels to simple QoL mods (rust liveries for someone trying to role-play a clapbox). Other things, such as perhaps making garages have permanent map blips, or generally developing a script that lets a shop keep a car for an amount of time in the interest of role-play may be beneficial.

 

The idea behind a market for car parts as actual /inventory items is worth looking into as well. The only way it works is if it benefits the entirety of the people on the server — custom parts get created by a shop, custom parts are part of a vehicle once installed, and custom parts can be stolen or taken when a car is chopped. This has the potential to develop itself into something beautiful, and car theft rings/the parts black market/aftermarket shops catch on.

 

The real problem is the average player isn't interested in the role-play behind a vehicle. They're just interested in getting the modifications done and having fun with the vehicle. The server has somehow normalized absolutely needing all the performance upgrades on a regular car, when in reality, stock cars are what you find the most.

anyone's opinion on this? i personally think this hits the spot in terms of marking solutions for certain things that are issues with the current garage system right now, and the status quo in terms of how garages are ran in terms of opening hours. i think someone also mentioned in the first page to have a queue of vehicles instead of a queue of people as well, where cars are left in a garage script-wise (?) so that the mechanics are able to go through modification requests at their own time

 

ALSO mindless brainstorming here, this might be complicated to do and one of the few lower priorities among other things being worked on on GTAWorld right now but if the opinion rises a good reaction here i might make it a game suggestion. perhaps that same system of vehicle queues implemented, with a small GUI much like the MDC wherein we are able to see the requested modifications for each vehicle, contact information for the owner

 

and a system where it doesn't install all the modifications at once and requires the mechanic to individually type a command that marks "starting modification 1" and another command that marks "finished modification 1" that generates a log of what roleplay was done between those commands to complete said mod that garage owners/admins can access to moderate their garages. i understand it would be extremely difficult to implement this but it just came to me right this second so i figured i'd pop it out

[Yerrr]

1 minute ago, Bridget Schmidt said:

Or people should lower their expectation and impatience on how long it should take to do? This can go back and forth all day long but at the end of the day it's the customers yelling about their stuff taking forever that cause it to go fast, not the other way around. I can spend hours roleplaying an engine swap if I wanted to and have the time for it. Hell I have on my car when I have nothing else to do because I enjoy the roleplay of doing. This kind of argument is what confuses me on this post, you want more realistic roleplay with garages fine? Oh wait you want less time being needed to be spend or just to do it yourself with a script and no roleplay? Those two arguments are contradictory to themselves and offer no valid solutions.  

The point being is a lot of these garages? I hate to say it, leased by some people with horrible portrayal. It's not really about taking your time with shit but at the same time putting in the effort doesn't hurt. This is a roleplay server after all. When your doing 20 mods to each car (like 10 cars) in under 10 minutes? It becomes a quality issue for the server. Might as well make them like 24/7s where you can leave your car there for x amount of time as the mods get 'installed' and have it NPCed and not player owned/leased lol.


Go on the GTA:W discord and in the search bar you search for business ads for garages? Barely any in recent times. Like I said, MOST except a select few only cater to their friends and use it as their own personal business for their friend group.